Who actually owns your business website?

A builder rang us in February. His website had been down for nine days, the man who made it four years ago had stopped answering, and he wanted to know how to get it back.

The hard part of that conversation is never technical. It is explaining that the thing he calls his website is three separate assets, held in three separate places, and that he might not own any of them. Most small business owners have never been told this, because the question only comes up on the day it has already gone wrong.

A website is three things, not one

The domain name. The hosting account it is served from. The code and content that make up the site itself. They are bought separately, they live in separate places, and they can end up with separate owners without anybody deciding that on purpose.

You can own all three. You can own one. We have seen a business own the domain and nothing else, which is the least bad version, and a business own the content and neither of the other two, which is the worst. Losing the code costs you a rebuild. Losing the domain costs you every link, every business card, every email address and whatever search ranking you had built up, all at once.

The domain: one field decides it

Look your domain up on a WHOIS service and ignore most of what comes back. The field that matters is the registrant. That is the legal owner. The registrar is only the company the registration is administered through, and people confuse the two constantly.

If the registrant field carries an agency's name, the domain belongs to that agency. Not to you, and not a bit to each of you. Paying the annual renewal through them for six years does not move it. Nor does the fact that the domain is your trading name.

The reason this happens is rarely malice. Somebody registered it quickly on the day the project started, put their own company in the box because it was their account, and never went back. Four years later they have sold the business or stopped replying, and a perfectly ordinary shortcut has become your problem.

Getting a .uk domain back when nobody will help you

Here is the part almost nobody knows, and it is the single most useful thing in this article. For a .uk domain you can move the registration to a new provider yourself, without the co-operation of the one holding it now.

Nominet run the .uk registry, and their own guidance says it: if your current registrar is unable to complete the move, you can move your domain name to a new registrar using Nominet Online Services. It costs 10 pounds plus VAT as a single transaction fee, and that is the whole fee even if you move several domains in the same go. You pick the domains, choose Change Registrar, enter the new provider's details, pay, and it is done.

Two catches. You sign in with the admin contact email address on the record, so if that address is also your old designer's, sort that out first through Nominet's forgotten password route. And some registrars have what Nominet call a handshake, meaning the receiving provider has to accept the domain onto their system manually. They get five days. Miss it and the request times out with an automatic refund, and you start again.

Changing the owner is a different job from changing the provider, and people muddle them. A registrant transfer also runs through Online Services, also costs 10 pounds plus VAT however many domains are in the transaction, and the new registrant has five days to accept the emailed request before it lapses.

What changes on 9 February 2027

If you are reading this later than that date, the process above has moved on. Nominet have confirmed the .UK standardisation transition for Tuesday 9 February 2027, and the IPS tag system goes with it.

In its place, a transfer authorisation code. The registrar you are leaving generates the code and gives it to the registrant. The registrar you are joining enters it, and if the domain is unlocked and the code is correct the transfer completes immediately. Each code lasts 14 days and dies once it has been used.

For most people that is an improvement on tags. For the person in the position this article describes, it has one awkward feature: the new process starts with the provider you are trying to leave. Nominet's own direct route still exists. It is worth knowing which way this is going before you plan around it.

.com and the rest: ICANN wrote the rule you need

Generic domains work differently. They run under ICANN's Transfer Policy, which has been in force since June 2016, and it is unusually direct about the situation we are describing.

Section 5.4: the registrar of record must not refuse to remove the ClientTransferProhibited status or release an AuthInfo code to the holder solely because there is a dispute between them over payment. Section 3.9.1 puts nonpayment for a pending or future registration period on the list of things a transfer may not be refused over. And section 3.8 sets out what a registrar must refuse on, which is a short list: a pending UDRP, a court order, an existing dispute over a previous transfer, a URS proceeding, and a 60-day lock that follows a change of registrant. Unpaid web design work is not there.

Section 5.2 puts a clock on it too. Where the registrar does not give you a self-service way to generate your own auth code and unlock the domain, they have five calendar days from your request to do both. Section 5.3 says the process they make you follow cannot be more awkward than changing your contact details.

None of that says you do not owe the money. It says the domain is not the lever.

One trap while you are in there. If you need to both move registrar and change the registered owner, do the registrar move first. ICANN's own policy advises exactly that, because a change of registrant triggers a 60-day transfer lock unless the previous registrant opted out beforehand. There are two other 60-day locks worth knowing about: one for 60 days after the domain is first registered, and one for 60 days after any transfer between registrars.

Hosting: whose name is on the account

Less dramatic than the domain, and easier to fix, but it catches people the same way. A great many small business sites live inside a reseller account belonging to the agency that built them. Your site is a folder. You have no login, no billing relationship, and no way to take a copy of anything.

The test is simple. Can you log in, see your own invoice, and download a backup without asking anyone? If not, you are a tenant rather than an account holder. That is survivable while the relationship is good. It is not survivable when the agency stops trading, which is the scenario that produces most of these calls.

The code, and the bit of law nobody mentions

This is where the assumption most people hold turns out to be wrong.

Section 11(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 says the author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it. Section 11(2) carves out one exception, and only one: where the work is made by an employee in the course of employment, the employer owns it, subject to any agreement to the contrary.

A freelancer is not your employee. Neither is an agency. So when you commission a website, the default position is that the person who wrote it owns the copyright in it and you have a licence to use it. You paid for a site. What you bought, legally, may be permission.

Section 90(3) is how you change that, and the wording leaves no room: an assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor. Not a verbal agreement at the kick-off meeting. Not a line in an email thread. Not an invoice stamped paid in full. Signed, in writing, from the person giving it up.

In practice this almost never comes to anything, because almost nobody wants to fight about a five-page site for a plumber. It starts mattering when there is money in the room. A business being sold, a designer who wants paying for a rebuild you gave to somebody else, a logo that turns up on a competitor's site. Then the question of who holds the copyright stops being academic.

We are an IT company. We are not a law firm, we do not give legal advice, and if a real dispute is brewing you want a solicitor rather than us. What we can tell you is what to ask for and when, which is at the start of a project, while everybody is still friendly and it costs nothing.

Five things to get before you pay the final invoice

Ask on day one and this is administrative. Ask on the last day and it becomes a negotiation, held at the point where the work is already done and you have already paid for most of it.

• Access to the registrar account, with your business named in the registrant field. Check the field yourself rather than taking it on trust.
• A hosting account in your name, with its own billing, not a folder in somebody's reseller panel.
• A copy of the source code and the database, as files, held somewhere you control.
• Admin logins for the site and everything bolted onto it, including analytics, forms and any payment gateway.
• A signed assignment of copyright. One page. Section 90(3) is the reason it has to be signed and written.

What we do about it

Our web design page answers the ownership question in six words: you do. You get the domain, the hosting account and the code. That is not a marketing line, it is the thing to hold us to, and it is why the sentence is published rather than buried in a contract.

The packages are on the pricing page like everything else we sell. Essential Web is 270 pounds then 39 a month, Professional Business is 450 then 69, Complete Digital is 900 then 84 a month for the first year and 99 after that, all plus VAT. The monthly figure covers hosting, SSL, daily backups kept for 30 days, uptime monitoring and security updates. It is not an instalment plan on the build, and stopping it does not cost you the site. It costs you the hosting, which is a different thing and you can take the files elsewhere.

If you already have a site and you are not sure what you hold, that is normal and we look at those more often than we build new ones. We will audit what is there and say honestly whether repairing it or rebuilding is the better use of your money. Sometimes the answer is that the site is fine and nobody has been paying attention to it, which is a much cheaper problem. Our piece on what a business website should cost in 2026 covers the money side, and changing IT provider covers the same handover problem on the support side, where it shows up just as often.

The one thing to do this week

Look up your own domain. It takes a minute, it costs nothing, and the registrant field either has your business in it or it does not.

If it does, you are in better shape than most of the people who ring us. If it does not, you have found that out on a quiet Monday rather than on the morning your site goes dark and the only person who can fix it has changed their number.